Doors Opening

It’s been no secret to any of my friends and Twitter followers that I’ve been looking for new opportunities, especially in the Android space. Sometimes the harder you look for something the harder it is to find and sometimes the best things happen to you almost by accident.

In April I saw a tweet show up in my feed about MobileDevCamp NYC. For those that don’t know, it’s basically “get a bunch of developers, designers, and other assorted geeks together and see what they can build in 24 hours.” I first heard about it less than a week before it was scheduled but there were tickets still available so I signed up.

We split up into 14 teams of about six people each. The team I was on built a cross-platform YouTube playlist app for iOS and Android. One of the other members of our team was a developer for the social media site Patch.com. They collect community-specific news and information for individual towns and communities using local editors, writers, photographers, and videographers that actually live in or near the towns they cover.

Apparently something about me impressed him because the next day I received an email from the company inviting me to come in for an interview. Three days later I was downtown interviewing with several people including part of the team in Dublin, Ireland. To make a not-very-long story shorter, an offer was made and an offer was accepted. Starting May 23rd I will be joining Patch.com as a mobile developer working on a project I don’t think I can talk about yet (cause I don’t know if its been publicly announced yet.) I’m very excited to be working with this team. This will be the first time I’ve worked at a large company (frankly, anything more than a half-dozen people is large for me) and the first time I’ll be working with designers, product managers, etc, etc.

As for this blog I’ll eventually move it to a new location. I don’t know yet if Patch.com has a developer’s blog (or wants to start one.) If so, I hope to start blogging there. Otherwise, I’ll have to figure something else out. I still plan on speaking at CodeStock on June 3rd and 4th and at MADExpo on June 30th – July 1st (you can still register for MADExpo here.) Anything after that I’ll have to play by ear.

I tweeted a while ago about how if life is full of up’s and down’s someone was having a lot of fun with all my up’s. With this move, I’ve started to reclaim my up’s.